In this place, a once-thriving village called Qezelabad, Taliban soldiers swept in four years ago and shot and stabbed nearly everything that was alive. When they left, almost everything was dead, and the survivors returned on the fourth day to wash the bodies and put them in the ground. They were a minority people, the Hazaras who lived in Qezelabad, but their neighbors came from hamlets far away when they heard the terrible news.

They came to dig.

After the funerals, the villagers moved away; the Taliban guards thought the 70 bodies underfoot were too powerful a symbol to allow anyone to cultivate. Today, the wind whips through an empty village, past the tiny mounds that are some of the only evidence that anyone ever lived here.

Mass graves wreathe this ancient Afghan city, bearing the grim evidence of its central role in this country's civil war. For six years, Mazar-i-Sharif was the Afghan crucible, the place where the feuds and betrayals and ancient rifts played themselves out with the greatest ferocity. The Taliban came into this city and left, and then came and left again, each time in a trail of sorrow and death.

Now, as Afghanistan appears set to embark on a new Western-backed political experiment, the town stands as a somber warning.

Human rights groups say thousands of people perished here in the ethnic and religious bloodletting that engulfed the city, particularly in two great massacres in 1997 and 1998. But the truth seems as ill-defined as the fading mounds that mark the graves.

Today, Mazar-i-Sharif hums with the giddiness of a city set free. The music shops are jammed, the turbans are off, and the young women, their faces peeking out from tightly wrapped head scarves, are once again strolling the sidewalks of Balkh University. In the first sweet moments of liberty, few people seem eager to confront the recent past or gather the details with which they might construct their history.

''The graves, they're in the desert,'' said Muhammad Islam, 45, as he sat at the counter of his auto parts store in the city center. ''It's too late. They're hidden in the sand. You'll never find them now.''

But some graves, unlike those of the Hazara, are advertised for their Taliban victims. In the desert outside of town, in the middle of a flat and empty expanse, a billboard proclaims the area hallowed ground.

It is perhaps 20 feet wide, this giant outdoor advertisement, and it reflects the austerity that was the Taliban aesthetic: a wooden sign, trimmed with metal and adorned with tin cones that look like gasoline funnels turned upside down.

''In this place, hundreds of martyrs lie buried,'' the sign says, in Dari and Pashto, the language of the Taliban. ''In 1997, the holy Taliban were betrayed by the great traitor Malik and hundreds of Taliban were massacred by the pagans. These pagans stalked the real Muslims, and killed all of them, and buried them in different parts of this desert.''

The Taliban are gone from Mazar-i-Sharif now, and the sign has been smeared with mud. No one knows how many Taliban soldiers were buried in the deserts outside the city, probably thousands. But it was the massacre of the Taliban in 1997 that sparked the reprisals against other groups that continued until the Taliban left the city for good last month.

The Taliban tombstone in the desert puts it succinctly.

''By God's grace, the Taliban captured the northern region of Afghanistan in 1998, and massacred the pagans.''

The bloodletting here arose from the tangled politics of the Afghan civil war, which by May 1997 pitted the ragtag Northern Alliance against a Taliban army that had rolled over most of the country. Mazar-i-Sharif, the commercial center of northern Afghanistan, was the country's last great prize.

With the Taliban just outside the city limits, a local Northern Alliance commander, Malik Pahlawan, struck a deal that allowed them to enter the city without firing a shot. Mr. Pahlawan made the move to upstage his own leader, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.

Within hours after Taliban troops entered the city, a Northern Alliance militia comprised of Hazara troops backed out of the deal and attacked the Taliban. The Hazaras, who largely adhere to the Shiite branch of Islam, had been the special targets of the Taliban, who are Sunnis.

Soon, Mr. Pahlawan's troops joined in the fighting. Hundreds of Taliban troops, caught off guard, were either killed or taken prisoner.

When Taliban troops first entered Mazar-i-Sharif, Jawat, a 23-year-old Pashtun man, walked outside to greet them. But instead of a celebration he saw the bodies of Taliban soldiers scattered in the streets. Mr. Jawat says he watched as Hazara militia men executed 20 Taliban soldiers, throwing them up against a wall and firing their machine guns.

According to aides of General Dostum, one of the warlords now presiding over Mazar-i-Sharif, Mr. Pahlawan ordered thousands of Taliban prisoners taken to the desert and shot. He then fled to Iran.

Ruzi, a 23-year-old farmer who frequently crosses the desert outside of Mazar-i-Sharif, did not see the Taliban prisoners being killed that day. But he watched their bodies being dug up a year later.

It was late summer of 1998, Mr. Ruzi said, just after the Taliban had captured Mazar-i-Sharif for the last time. Mr. Ruzi said he watched Taliban troops pull perhaps 300 bodies from the ground, many out of shipping containers where they had been stuffed by Northern Alliance soldiers. ''The Taliban put the bodies in caskets and took them to Kandahar,'' Mr. Ruzi said.

In the emptiness of the desert, the graves seem at once everywhere and nowhere.

Less than a mile from the Taliban billboard, a visitor asked a local man recently if the area contained any Taliban cemeteries.

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''Well, there is one right here,'' said Yosin, a 26-year-old farmer who had stopped his tractor on the road.

Sure enough, Mr. Yosin was pointing to a crude tombstone made of mud and rocks.

Traveling the route four years ago, Mr. Yosin said, he came across the bodies of some 600 Taliban soldiers strewn across the desert. Some were half-buried, Mr. Yosin said, some had been dug up by dogs.

After the 1997 massacre, the Taliban retreated from Mazar-i-Sharif, only to return with special ferocity the next year. They made no deals this time. Instead, by many accounts, they headed straight for the Hazara neighborhoods, shooting and stabbing in a frenzy that left thousands of civilians dead.

In Ferduous Park, an ethnically mixed neighborhood, most of the Hazaras saw what was coming. They ran for the mountains on the city's southern side.

The family of Aqhela, a 50-year-old Hazara woman, stayed behind. She figured her family had nothing to hide.

The Taliban soldiers entered Aqhela's house on Aug. 11, 1998, three days after the Taliban had taken control of Mazar-i-Sharif. The Taliban troops, certain that most of the city's Hazaras were guerrilla fighters, demanded that Aqhela's family turn over its guns.

''We didn't have any guns; we were ordinary people,'' she said.

When no guns were produced, Ms. Aqhela said, the Taliban soldiers dragged her husband, Akbar, and his two brothers, Anwar and Ramazdan, out of the house and down the muddy street. In an intersection about a quarter mile away, Aqhela said, the Taliban soldiers made Akbar and his brothers stand at attention, and then they gunned them down with bursts from their Kalashnikovs.

With the neighborhood empty, Ms. Aqhela said she retrieved the bodies, rolling them into a pushcart and wheeling them back home. Too afraid to venture outside, Ms. Aqhela closed the gate and dug the graves in her yard, rolling each body off the cart and into its respective pit.

Today, Ms. Aqhela supports her three children by renting out a corner of her house to a boarder. Each morning, she walks to the small walled cemetery she built and sits down for a time.

''I think about my previous life,'' she said.

In Qezelabad, the Hazara ghost town, a lone man recently rode through the snow on a horse. Muhammad Isok was born in the village 30 years ago, and in 1997, when the Taliban attacked, he barely escaped. He came back the other day to remember his family, 30 of whom lie in Qezelabad's graves.

According to Mr. Isok, the Taliban soldiers laughed as they worked three years ago, shooting animals and children and old people. One of them fired at Mr. Isok but missed, and he ran to his home and gathered his family and lifted the carpet that hid the crawl space he had built while fighting the Soviets.

Mr. Isok and his wife and children lay in the hiding place until nightfall, when they slipped away and ran out of town.

When he returned four days later, Mr. Isok and Mr. Satar helped bury the village, washing the bodies and tying their toes and covering each in a shroud.

They dug seven pits, laying 10 bodies in each. As he worked, Mr. Isok said he recognized a son-in-law and a brother-in-law and a cousin among the dead. He said he could not make out the identities of everyone that day; the faces of many of the victims had been peeled away.

''It was a terrible day,'' he said.

When he finished speaking, Mr. Isok climbed back on his horse and rode out of Qezelabad. He said he would be coming back soon to start again.

People do try to start again, despite the encircling sorrow and graves. This is a more hopeful time for Mazar-i-Sharif. One month after the Taliban's retreat, the city is trying to look forward rather than back.

American dollars and German beer flow readily here, the former legal and the latter not. Radio Balkh, hardly listened to during Taliban times when the station played only Koranic readings, has begun playing music again.

The most popular song these days is ''Laili,'' named for a girl that steps in and out of a man's life:

You came from a village

And made me your lover

And now you've broken my heart.

Oh Laili, Laili, Laili,

Now you've broken my heart.

In the words, there is longing and sadness and a thirst for beauty -- emotions evident in much of this city. Few people here profess to know what the future will bring to Mazar-i-Sharif, or Afghanistan, but for now, the omens seem good.

At the Azrat Ali mosque, the doves have returned. The birds are a famous part of this city: according to legend the birds were brought by Sultan Hussein Baiqhra in the 17th century from Nejev in modern-day Iraq. Nejev is said to hold the body of Ali, the son of Islam's Holy Prophet, Muhammad, and Mazar-i-Sharif his spirit.

Quri Amonullah, the mullah at Azrat Ali, said the doves were the first to leave when the fighting started in Mazar-i-Sharif, and often the last to return.

''They went to special hiding places,'' the turbaned cleric said. ''Sometimes for many days.''